Archive for promoting yourself

Facebook keeps releasing new features to their self-serve PPC platform. It feels like Google from 2003– are you keeping up?

Did you see that you can target people on their birthdays, in addition to your existing fans, as well as being able to select multiple countries?

If you’re selling gifts of any type– this is your chance to do something. Cards, flowers, T-shirts, silly items… Doesn’t even have to be birthday related– you could even promote a little cosmetic surgery to older women– Imagine this ad:

If you’re a brand, you can pay to hit your fans when they’re elsewhere on Facebook– think of this like the old days of Paid Inclusion on Yahoo! or perhaps like today’s brand bidding. The point is there is some level of cannibalization to pay for people that you already “have” as fans. Yet if this drives incremental traffic, you can price in that overlap to make sure it backs out. And if you have less than 100 fans, who cares. But if you’re a brand like WWE and have over 250,000 fans, it would be a great way to drive marginal revenue. Now it’s too bad you can’t target OTHER people’s brands and fan pages. That would be like Coke bidding on Pepsi. What would you pay to be able to target your competitors? Oh, wait– I forgot. You can do that all day long on PPC.

If you just want to be a pimp: Some peoplejust don’t have a good reason to market. But maybe if you get to 100 fans on your page, you can then register your page’s vanity url here. Even if you have no fans to start with, if you’re paying 30 cents a fan, it’s only $30 to get to 100 fans, and then you can grab a name like facebook.com/toiletpaper or whatever you fancy.Many generic names are still free.

If you’re making profits via these new tactics, however small, it’s time to scale them up. If you are a non-spammy advertiser, then I welcome you to sign up for our automated Facebook ad posting platform, which automatically multiples variations of ad creatives and landing pages, then reports back with the best performers. If you’re selling weight loss, get rich quick scams (also euphemistically called “BizOpps”) or products that auto-renew at insane rates (called “negative option”), then don’t bother, since your ads won’t get approved by us or by Facebook.

But maybe you’re a stay at home dad filming how to home school videos or perhaps reviewing top 10 kids movies, in preparation for the upcoming Christmas shopping season. Don’t laugh– if you’re an affiliate and you aren’t starting now, you’re late to the game. Then it makes sense to start promoting your wares.

I’m presenting on Facebook advertising at Affiliate Summit East in 2 weeks, and again, at HostingCon 2 days later. Come join me!

Remember a few weeks ago when Facebook allowed everyone to grab their own vanity url? Now they’ve just opened up the ability for you to choose a name for your pages, too. You just need 100 fans to be eligible. Just like you’d see in the domain grabbing world, the same thing is happening on Facebook.

Wow, someone created “Dennis NotYu” under our company name. I’ll take that as a compliment! At the same time, you can report folks who infringe on your brand or company name.

We were too late to get this for a client that did funeral planning. Morbid that this girl’s personal profile name is “funerals”– I would have expected her to dress in all black.

So get your fan pages each up to 100 fans and start grabbing names– there are a ton still available. Go to facebook.com/usernames.

A couple weeks ago, Jeremy Shoemoneycame to visit BlitzLocal and we headed to a Denver strip club with Scott Richter and other folks in tow. Here’s the shot we took outside the club which you can also see in today’s shoemoney.com post. Tell me, is that a good or a bad thing to be seen outside a strip club, even though we’re there to play the awesome beer pong, for which they have tournaments on Tuesday and Thursday nights?

Do a search for “hooked on phonics” and you’ll see 869,000 results on Google. If you’re an affiliate pushing this program, you know how much it costs per click on paid search, plus what the payouts are if you promote via Commission Junction or Amazon.com (if you’re not in certain states)– generally 15% or around $20 a sale. As an affiliate, you’re not allowed to bid on the term “hooked on phonics”, “hooked on fonics”, “hooked on phonix” or related terms– they’re branded terms reserved for the advertiser. So the most popular search is off limits to you if you are just a PPC affiliate.

Incidentally, I think it’s hilarious that so many people who want to learn how to read are misspelling the brand like crazy. It’s like those people who bought time management books, but never had the time to get around to reading them.

Now consider my friend Keith Wilcox who bought Hooked on Phonics for his kids. He’s been blogging for 3 weeks now– never blogged before– and his site is now Google PR2 and is starting to rank for commercial terms. The site gets only a few hundred hits a day– but not bad for a site only a month old and with less than 50 posts.

The key point here is that he’s blogging about what he likes and knows a lot about– how to home school kids. You can see his video, where his 5 year old is reading at the 2nd grade level and is a month away from starting 3rd grade. The post has 923 words and doesn’t use any formulas for keyword density, page title stuffing, hidden divs, cloaking, or any SEO tricks to get traffic. Rather, he’s just writing passionately about homeschooling his two children. I’ll bet you could come up with some ways that he could get more traffic and make more money here. I’ll list a couple:

Title his youtube video: “hooked on phonics: teaching my kids“ instead of “reading 06292009″. Also add a description that says something like “Actual lesson with Hooked on Phonics. My 5 year old is reading at the second grade level. I am proud to home school my two boys.” YouTube is the 4th largest search engine on the planet, based on a recent Google seminar we attended, but there are only 320 videos competing on “hooked on phonics”.

Link to the Hooked on Phonics site with your affiliate code: No tracking code, no commission earned. Name a product you like– odds are there’s an affiliate program for it.

Mix up the keywords: Jam in too many reading related terms and it won’t sound natural. Use Google Suggest and Wonder Wheel to see what the popular terms are.

All this to show that a person who is not an affiliate by any stretch can get traffic from just writing good content and getting a couple good links here and there.

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Update: He now has a top Daddy Bloggers list, with 115 sites carefully chosen and reviewed. Already, he is building links from sites that are topically relevant and already trusted by Google.

3 million users took their names last Friday in Facebook’s vanity url rush.

But even bigger than that is grabbing the vanity urls for your fan page(s), which opens up June 28th. If you have at least 1,000 fans by May 31st, then you can grab them now. Likewise, if you’re a journalist or a name brand, you can request their team to do it for you. We took that liberty for a few of our casual dining clients. It might even help us rank onpest controleventually.

For example, if you’re looking for Send Out Cards, you don’t have to go to some crazy url anymore. And the Facebook team has smartly 301 redirected the old url to this new one. The new url is only on the 3rd page of Google organic results, but will climb over time.

Want to SEO your Facebook fan page? I was chatting with one of the Facebook executives, who described how anything you do in traditional SEO applies towards SEO for your Facebook page.

Get more friends to fan your page– the link juice will flow. Put up a ton of good content to attract links from inside Facebook and from external sites. Facebook will likely already rank for your name as well as your organization’s name– so link to it from other sites you control.

Create a ton of content– Facebook has widgets for music, videos, WordPress blogging, twitter, and everything else imaginable. Tie all these social sites together– not just for SEO reasons, but so that users can connect with you via their favorite method. I don’t use FriendFeed and Plaxo, but there are enough friends that do that I automatically update status there anyway.

Even if you’re not interested in being a social media expert, at least you can have a placeholder to avoid reputation management problems such as that of North Dakota State University Admissions. And don’t just grab your Facebook url, tie it in with stuff like your FriendFeed for Dennis Yu.

“I am capable of playing a great variety of roles; however my areas of greatest strength lie in guiding technical teams to deliver solutions that truly meet users’ expectations. My experience addresses all aspects of these efforts ranging from working with executive management on strategy and approach to helping developers resolve challenging technical issues and everything in-between.”

Do you remember that scene from “Office Space” where the Bobs ask Tom Smykowski, “So, what would you say you do here?” And the most that the useless Initech employee can come up with is that he brings the requirements to the engineers. When you look at this guy’s resume, it lists this…

…along with every technology and language in the book. That’s called “buzzword bingo”. Yet, he’s not a programmer, based on this:

Senior technical leader, Manager/Consultant/Architect.
Extensive experience leading global teams composed of both technical and functional members of up to forty people working on multiple, concurrent efforts.
16 years of professional experience.

The economy is in the toilet, and so is the quality of candidates that come streaming in. But every once in a while, you find a star, and those folks are especially hard to find among the folks that are likely let go for good reason. The outlook for internet marketing is as hot as ever, and it’s still as hard to find folks, no matter what the economy. What’s your experience in finding good people?

There was once a study where psychologists shown subjects a series of pictures, asking them to rate how attractive the people in the pictures were. Unknown to the subjects, they sometimes saw two of the same person– the difference being that one picture would be digitally manipulated to increase pupil dilation. The impact? The picture with the increased pupil dilation would on average receive one point higher in ratings– say, a 7, instead of a 6, out of 10. The ancient Egyptians knew this two thousand years ago. Before going out, girls would put eyedropper solution in their eyes to dilate their pupils.

But why does this work?

When you are attracted to someone, your brain instructs your eyes to let in more light– to collect more information on the object you are interested in. Thus– the law of reciprocity, which is the old Dale Carnegie trick of “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People”. How can you take the old techniques of remembering people’s names, asking people to talk about themselves, and giving compliments (instead of criticism)– and update that to the year 2009?

I like you

Do I? Who knows, but there was once a car salesman in the Pacific Northwest who mass mailed prospects and handed out zillions of business cards. He is allegedly the top car salesman in the US. The secret? (No, not “The Secret”, which is a book and movie). He printed “I like you” on the backs of these cards. Completely obvious, yes– but effective, nonetheless. Facebook just released a feature where you can click “I like it” against any activity in your feed. There is almost no downside to hitting “I like it” to anything that is in your feed as well as anything that a friend posts (within reason). At the extreme, perhaps you can be accused of a nodding bobblehead or a “yes man”– perhaps a risk if you were to create a script that automatically hit “I like this” for anything you and your friends do on Facebook. Hint: who wants to write the script and sell it to people on Linkedin? Insurance and real estate agents would love it, by the way.

Your baby is beautiful and what a delicious meal you made!

Not all babies are beautiful– sorry. And not every dinner at a friend’s house was the best [insert name of food] that you’ve ever had. But back to the rule of reciprocity, people like folks who like them. So in the world of LinkedIn, you can write a glowing recommendation of someone who you’d actually like to have a recommendation from. There is a good chance they will reciprocate– provided that your recommendation is authentic and thoughtful.

I’ll invite my 10,000 of my best friends

Yeah, right. Remember the days of MySpace trains, where you could join the train and auto-friend everyone else– then get a million friends overnight? The same is true with LinkedIn and Facebook– there are people who think that the quantity of friends makes up for lack of any depth with a few key close friends. “So how many followers do you have on Twitter?”, was a question that came up in last night’s Tweetup in San Francisco. I happen to have almost a thousand. There are folks who have 30 times that. Yet the ratio of how many folks you have followed, divided by my how many friends you have is a more accurate measure of your influence. There are guys who have followed 10,000 people, and naturally got 3,000 folks to friend back. Then they unfollow most of those original people and have a great looking ratio. It goes back to developing relationships, which can only be done one person at a time.

Too much of any good thing is bad…

There is abuse in any of these tactics– but it doesn’t mean the tactic is not valid. Overdo it and people will wonder if anything you say is just a veiled attempt at self-promotion. But as Mark Twain said, “The key to success is to be genuine. Fake that and you’ve got it made!”

I have to admit– the restaurants, hotel suites, and first class flights are nice. It’s even nicer to be able to tell folks about it, since you’re getting twice the benefit (enjoying plus telling). Is there anything wrong with wanting to enjoy the good life? Does that make me evil or greedy? Hey, you only live once.

And as for showing off, isn’t that part of the game? Just look at the food pictures that JohnChow.com takes or the lifestyles that other affiliates openly broadcast to the world. In fact, I think it’s a legitimate business expense. My business as an affiliate marketer and ability to broker deals is largely based on my reputation. Thus, when folks gossip about my lifestyle, I consider it to be free PR. And it’s better than paid advertising– it’s more believable. And why not take friends out to nice places? You’re building relationships, plus they’ll return the favor to you.

But now that I’ve created a “baller” reputation, I’ve had to strive hard to maintain it, even when I’m broke. The reason I fly first class now is that I’m afraid of someone seeing me fly coach. Yeah, the seat is bigger and the food is much better. But really, if someone who knows me happens to see me in coach, my reputation will be ruined. They will go and tell everyone. Plus, I’ll have less to talk about when I’m hanging around other affiliates that I’m trying to impress. I might even be made fun of or folks might not think that I’m a serious player in business. They’ll think that I’m just fronting.

The nice thing about affiliate marketing is that I can avoid discussion of what I actually do. Obviously, because of my lifestyle, I “must” be successful. But what offers am I running, how do I get that traffic, what’s my payout, do I actually have any true expertise– those questions will remain unanswered. Of course, I’m not going to tell you– that’s how I make money and I’m not about to broadcast my secrets to the world, you understand? If I was doing agency-level work, such as had clients, then you could look at the clients I have and evaluate my work and that of my “team”.

But I am a one-man promotional vehicle. My “team” consists of loose relationships with other affiliate marketers and some contract Indians I once hired on a job board. I actually have no operating or project management expertise. In fact, I don’t understand the basic differences between personal and corporate finance– I run them all under my personal bank account, which gets me into trouble with the IRS. But if you ask me, I will deny any problems. My ego and image is priority #1. Everyone else is boasting about their earnings that don’t exist, so this is just part of the game. And was with any game, you do whatever it takes to win. All is fair in love and war and affiliate marketing.

Maintaining my front is getting increasingly difficult. Bernard Madoff was able to keep it going for 4 years before being found out a couple weeks ago. Reed Slatkin, one of the other larger Ponzi frauds in history, was able to keep it going for 15 years. But what you don’t know won’t hurt you. Like they say– if you got it, flaunt it. Or as Mark Twain would say, “The secret to success is to be genuine– fake that, and you’ve got it made.”

People, this is the American dream. We know that Hollywood actors are just pretending and nobody has a problem with that. And nobody thinks twice about how most marketing is just thinly veiled lies about whether that attractive young lady will actually have sex with you holding that particular brand of beer, or whether a certain diet supplement will really make you attractive or increase/decrease a particular body part’s size. Hey– want to lose weight quickly, by the way?

There’s a sucker born every minute, so if it isn’t me selling you those items, it will be someone else. Caveat emptor (or “buyer beware” for those of you who don’t know Latin). If you’re dumb enough to fall for these marketing tricks, then you deserve to have your money taken from you. I don’t have time to discuss the difference between ethical and legal. I follow the Golden Rule– whoever has the gold, makes the rules. Did I mention–there’s money to be made! I’ll steal from you, too, if you’re dumb enough to be taken. And what do you call a dumb criminal? One that gets caught.

I decided to join Technorati today to see how my blog stacks up against the zillion other blogs out there. I’m not a public figure, nor do I blog much, so I don’t expect much of anything here. Part of what’s required to join is to verify that you own your blog. Thus, I am pasting in this code:

I’m competing against my friend, Larby Amirouche, to see who can get a higher ranking in the blogosphere.

Today I received two “urgent” messages from a Facebook user named Brian Zisk. They are both similar in content and tone, so I’ll just post one of them below. There is a game on Facebook called “Friends For Sale“. You buy and sell friends, and in the process are able to give them nicknames, send them virtual gifts, and write on their walls.

For fun, I bought a number of folks and promoted the company that I work at. I even promoted the affiliate marketing blog of a friend, who was promoted on TechCrunch. Turns out, this Brian Zisk fellow carried out his threat. My current status message in this game is now ”I’m the ShitzLocal.com Spammer. Boycott my company!“

For a proponent of the arts and self-expression, it’s surprising to see someone get his panties in a wad over a silly Facebook game.

Facebook

Please change the message under my name on friends for sale to something like it was before, or anything non-offensive, but please remove the reference to your company from my listing the next time you log in so I do not have to see the association, or I will buy you on friends for sale and you will most likely not be happy with the text I associate with your name and company.

I am sure this is but a misunderstanding, but do not find it amusing, and would appreciate you removing this irritation ASAP.